Jesus Christ as John Wayne?

Sometimes I like to chat with the farther right than I, those who some call the “God, Guns, and Gays” crowd. In case anyone is blessed enough to be oblivious, there is a culture war going on in the US, donja know. Social Justice Warriors versus Trumpians, the Right versus the Left, (but I’ve gone and lost the middle, so you’ll have to sort it all out yourself.) Traditionalists versus Conservatives, Constitutionalists versus Libertarians, this swirling mass of confusion right off the pages of a comic book, portraying a world seized by moral ambiguity and the endless struggle for that ever elusive clarity…

We need a hero, a cut and dry simplistic hero, none of this “Batman versus Superman” junk where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, because the good guy has gone bad and in the end the only one we’re certain is truly awful, the evil super-villian…. is the little Christian grandma. Yes, I recently read exactly that in a comic book. No more of this “truth, justice, and the American way,” junk that used to limit and oppress our superheroes, they now know who the real enemy is and it’s clearly grandma with her endless prayers and frequent admonishments. What a pain in the behind she is.

“What is this, Jesus Christ as John Wayne?” asked someone who is not such a fan of the 3G crowd, which caused me to choke on my coffee nearly as much as the comment that demanded to know, “am I sharpening iron here or trying to polish a turd?”

Ah people, you gotta love them, they can be so darn funny…

Before anyone gets their bloomers in a twist, I am primarily just an observer, once in a while a bit of collateral damage, but mostly just someone who enjoys observing culture and putting in a good word for our Lord and Savior now and then.

So, John Wayne as Jesus Christ, those who take their protection and provision skills seriously, those who walk in the shadows of the Duke, and yes…. do sometimes get those two people confused. I envy them their innocence sometimes, the gunslingers who believe it is their sovereign duty to rid the world of evil and protect their loved ones.

So how do you get rid of evil? You shoot it, of course, becasue evil always comes dressed in black and rides in at sunset, clearly marked, and full of malevolent intent. Those are the bad guys, the undersirables, and they usually have an “E for Evil” tatooed on their forehead, which makes it okay to kill them. Oh, speak to me of castle doctines and imaginary burglars and the sweetness of a good Western where life is so simple…

Sometimes I think I am a woman who has simply seen too much. I am torn between the moral choice to burst bubbles, to shatter illusions, or the way leaving people in complete ignorance can be such bliss. I have simply seen too much, I know that one cannot actually shoot evil, that it does not wear black and ride into town, graciously allowing you to become a hero and save the day. Evil is so ordinary, so banal, and it seldom even recognizes itself for what it is.

You just can’t shoot things like cancer or addiction or child sexual abuse, you can’t fix broken hearts and broken spirits, you can’t shoot poverty and despair. You just can’t fix a broken world with a gun like John Wayne use to. I wish we could, I wish we lived in a world where might makes right and the good guys always win. I wish I could hand people a target clearly marked “evil” and just go pop some popcorn.

You learn some things when you’ve seen too much, you learn that when all you’ve got is God, God is all you need, and that when the world breaks you He draws even closer, and you learn that that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

When people feel lost, abandoned, and insecure, they will cling even to the illusion of certainty. Christian know there really is no security in this world, apart from God. But God has been removed as an acceptable source of comfort by our culture.

This cultural shift hasn’t happened by accident. The Cultural Elites have managed to instill in the public mind both self-righteousness and moral relativism simultaneously. Right can be whatever one wants to be and no one has a right to criticize it; hence evil can’t be defined, except that it’s vaguely something that opposes Right, which is a subjective opinion. But evil has to be stamped out anyway, since it isn’t right.

That’s why everything coming out of politicians, media, and academia today is 99% complete nonsense. And yet they have howling mobs behind them ready to tear down anybody who gets in their way—even though the way doesn’t lead anywhere.

Kind of interesting Eric, John Wayne has become the much longed for perception of masculinity…..or the root of all that is wrong in the world, depending on your perspective. He was of course, a movie star, an actor, a brand, but something I really do like about the man himself, he had a great love for women and he was affectionate, demonstrative towards his children. Many people don’t realize that about him, but there’s a woman nearby who may have collected every spontaneous photo of him every taken, and in every one he is either wrestling and kissing a child or caressing a woman. Love, demonstrative as in “tending to show feelings, especially of affection, openly.” It’s kind of a charming juxtaposition.

Yes, “self-righteousness and moral relativism simultaneously,” that does explain the craziness well.

You know, IB, I think I’d heard that about him at some point and then forgotten over time. That’s a beautiful thing isn’t it?!

Nice post, btw, sometimes I long for some obvious villains and larger-than-life heroes. I could use a hero and a small vacation from…so many things… lol. But it’s usually always hard and I guess it’s meant to be that way to sharpen us. Even in trying to express the happy mediums and the firm standards and boundaries… *sigh*. I think I may be learning to live with it better finally knowing that I’m always going to be misunderstood by someone… And that’s on top of the fact that I’ll never become free from the likelihood that I’m messing up too in how I word things!

When you’ve stood by the side of an opened mass grave with 2700 skulls in it you’ve seen too much, IB. Unfortunately we’re racing to the totalitarian thinking that will make this happen again, only this time much worse.

Evil often shows up cloaked in light and beauty. I find evil to be far more cunning than a lumbering, towering Goliath.

As far as shooting things—I agree that you can’t always fix things with a gun or weapon. On the other hand, when it comes to battle, the one with the weapon is most often the one that wins the fight. Even in a spiritual sense, we are not told to go to war with Satan without a “sword.” We carry the sword of the Spirit not just to attack, but also to defend.

Well said, Elihu. All in good humor here, but rather than trying to disarm, anyone, I plan to be standing behind those with the biggest weapons. A bit self serving of me, indeed 🙂

I’m glad you mentioned the sword of the Spirit. I think that’s a key part, it would be foolish to believe you can go into a battle with Satan armed with nothing but a literal sword. Even the angel Michael, great warrior that he is, “when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.”

When it comes to evil, “the Lord rebuke thee,” because we are small and soft and our bones are crunchy. Without the sword of the Spirit, we are actually unarmed.

Not long ago I heard a country-music song in wich the human supposed dualism was compared to Jesus and John Wayne. The lyrics were about, mom teaching about Jesus and mercy, and dad teaching how to be tough like a cowboy. It was curious and quaint.

The trouble people have in recognizing evil, is because they have been taught, that evil is in braking some arbitrary rules. It is not. Evil is in actions and their reprecussions. A selfish act may save your life, an overtly selfish act may put someone else in harms way. That is where the lines of good and evil are drawn. Good and evil are not some entities outside us humans, they are the results of our choises.

It is the arbitrary rules, that turn morals into a culturally relativist and subjective concept. Such relativity is just harder to see, if you have just one set of relative rules to comply to. That does not mean the one culturally relevant rules are the true ones, not even, if they are supposedly from some might makes right authority. It is natural for people to fall back on conservatism and seeking refuge of outside authority on difficult choises and rely on such culturally familiar rules when they feel insecure, but what we all should do, is not just accept something on blind obidience and faith, but to learn what are the most likely actual reprecussions of our possible actions and why. That is the way to cope with reality and actually be moral. Is it not?

I guess it is the “American way” to solve problems with violence (it seems like your nation is always declaring wars against what ever you feel threatens you, from war on terrorism, to war on drugs and even on fat), while this mindset is totally contradictionary to what the Jesus character in the New Testament is thought to have taught – you know – about turning the other cheek etc.

A nother thing about the “American way” that seems to be in total contrast with Jesus (sell all of your property and give all the money to the poor) is ideological capitalism, wich sells the view on human as justifiedly selfish and the value of an individual coming from how much money they can make. On the other hand this fits more or less with the Christian notion, that man is rotten to the core and only mercy can save him. Curious, is it not?

From where I am looking, the strength of the “American” culture is in progressiveness. Your constitution was once a very progressive outreach for better morals by it’s writers, such as the world famous deist Thomas Paine. (“…belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.”) Progression is not just about change and new gimmicks. A change is a change be it towards progression, or towards conservatism, or even atavism. For a change to be progressive, there needs to be a search for better information. To seek out what really is. Social progression is to seek out what really is wrong, and most importantly why. And then, only then… Doing the right thing.

“It is the arbitrary rules, that turn morals into a culturally relativist and subjective concept.”

Kind of interesting, but that really is the nature of progressivism, cultural relativism and subjective morality.

There are numerous problems within that paradigm, but it can be very challenging to explain to those who believe, “Good and evil are not some entities outside us humans.”

Truth and morality in the hands of human reason becomes a very subjective thing, a matter of nothing more than individual perception and eventually always arrives right back where it began, at might makes right.

In this crazy upside down world we live in, it is actually might makes right that I am opposed to, as is moral relativism, and subjective morality. Humans are simply not wise, not moral, and not capable of even perceiving the long range consequences of our own actions, all things that render us unqualified to even define good and evil beyond the short term and superficial.

Thank you for trying to look at things from my perspective and your swift reply.

I do not think the world is at all “crazy” or “upside down”, as you put it. The world is. You may consider it is upside down in comparrison to your own subjective expectations of it. But then you need to ask yourself how did you end up with expectations that obviously do not concur with reality. If you are capable of coming up with a better and more acceptable ideal for a world than that wich actually exists, are you not compelled to try to make it better? By wich standards and how do you know your standards are good and not evil? Most often by evaluating what the actual reprecussions of your actions could be if you were to set your standards in to practice, right?

Morals is the word we use when describing an evaluation of human behaviour in respect to the reprecussions of our actions, nothing much more. There are ideals of behaviour to wich we compare the actions and reprecussions of said actions. Those ideals exist as a result of our capacity to percieve possible future and our ability to evaluate it and make moral choises. Right?

Humans are capable of making moral choises and assesments. Are we not? That renders us quite qualified to define good and evil. Who else would make those judgement calls of good and evil for us? How would we go about to define wether if anyone (be it ourselves, man, or an alledged god) actually made a moral choise, or not? By relying on the authority of the highest possible imaginable authority? Even when we can not define wether such an authority even exists, as it is customary to expect such authority should be trusted in blind faith as no such authoriteis seem to be in any hurry to come and explain us just about anything? Are they? When such an authority is obviously not communicating with us on any level exept on the pages of an old book, you yourself have previously admitted also has morals in it, that merely represents the revenge fantasies of some human beings? If we simply assume that this entity tells us what is right or wrong through our conscience, then have we not admitted to the utmost subjective and relative morals? Letting our gut feeling most likely relative to our cultural biases in our subconscious to make an intuitive call on an issue we could apply logic to? Is that not irresponsible? Is it not necessarily culturally relative in whose version and interpretation on what the alledged, yet by definition unverifiable, ultimate judge we judge as worthy to be accepted as the moral truth?

If we can compare the alledged moral calls of different gods and we are able to come to a conclusion between them (even when we are most likely to support the gods most culturally relevant to ourselves) that one or several gods are moral and some are immoral, then is that moral evaluation on our part then not based on our own subjective moral views? I am sorry but religion is the route to cultural relativism and subjective moralism and I am sad to say most often also to authoritarianims and tribal moralism as well…

Have you ever heard of the Euthyphro Dilemma?

Absolute morality to achieve, would require absolute information, but it is a logical impossibility to achieve absolute information, as even if you were the sole creator of the universe and knew everything about it, you would not know what you do not know and that possible extra information might change your perspective alltogether. And your morals at the same time.

Not having absolute morals does not render us incapble of becoming ever better at morals. The way to reach that, is by better information. Is it not?

Progress is the necessary ideal for better quality of information. The quality of information defines morals. Only by better information we may achieve better choises as defined by the quality of the reprecussions of our actions.

I am sorry to hear that you percieve yourself and humans in your experience to be unqualified to define good and evil. Yet, our capacity to think beyond is the reason we bear the responsibility of our actions. We are limited in our knowledge and understanding, yes, but that does not remove our responsibility, does it? It is precisely our limitations, why we are responsible to progress in our thinking, actions and morals to achieve better quality information, to make better judgement calls, and ultimately to end up with better morals.

In my opinion many John Wayne movies are not at all solved by just pointing a gun and shooting at the problems. Rather the opposite. In at least the movies starred by John Wayne and directed by John Ford, the problems are far more complex than that and such simplistic solutions as just shooting what troubles or contradicts you. Rather those means are the attempts of the baddies to resolve the problems they face by violence, wich usually only leads to more trouble for everybody. In my opinion we recognize the good guys not because John Wayne is one of them, but by them trying to come up with a moral and complex solutions to the complex problems. Think for example about The Fort Apache. Do you see what I mean?